Musings from southern New Mexico

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An Asian acquaintance recently mentioned the appalling lack of Asian representation in polls regarding race. My first thought was that that is terrible. But next, I wondered why “mixed race” is an option in so few government forms. This, despite the explosion in “mixed race” citizens that has occurred in each of the last two places I have lived. For that matter, I know that my last previous home and current home (Hawaii and New Mexico) are both non-majority-white states. I’m interested in finding out more on these statistics, but the Census Bureau doesn’t seem particularly interested in this growing trend. Odd.

Perhaps I have reached old-fuddy-duddy-hood. Or perhaps being on the downward slope on the “years remaining” hill has altered my view on these things. I spent several hours yesterday evening attempting to purchase some software. As is often the case these days, one must create an account. To create an account, enter a value in each box. An appropriate value (say, “John” for “First Name”) will result in a green check mark next to said box. Alternatively, a red “X” indicates an error. So once each box has a green check mark, you hit the “Create Account” button.

Each of the first several dozen attempts (not exaggerating) resulted in the message: “There was an error in creating your account. Please try again.”

Really. That was the extent of the message. Randomly iterating through combinations of several email accounts, varying passwords such that each meets the stated standards, and changing Username each time, I eventually succeeded. This was after no less than 30 attempts. Actually, the number may have been closer to one hundred, as it took me from about seven at night to probably eleven.

I then spent time last night and this afternoon into the evening downloading the software. Apparently, the fact that many people get IP addresses dynamically is a secret to the developers, since each new IP address triggers an anti-fraud protection. This requires typing a code received by email. So I had to retrieve a new passcode from an email address I never use each time I was spontaneously kicked during the download process.

This morning, I attempted to continue the process, but the log in page showed that the servers were all down.

So this afternoon, I finished the process in a mere three hours. When the download finally completed, I hit the “Play” button.

A cinematic appeared. Actually, half a cinematic appeared. My monitor showed a lovely animation in the upper left hand portion. The bottom right hand portion of the screen, however, was black. A line from the top right corner to the bottom right corner separated the visible animation from a black screen. I imagine that was not intentional. After the cinematic played (or half played), a log in screen appeared. This came despite the fact that I had arrived at this screen from a place that had already required the user to be logged in.

Attempting to log in prompted the message that there was no account associated with the email address and password I had used (that I never wanted to use in the first place). After submitting a support ticket, I received a response stating that I had not done some additional step about which I had never been informed. Assuming this instruction was among the 18 emails I have received so far, I don’t care. I decided that the level of effort required was beyond what I was willing to put in.

The sources of funding for right wing nuttery seems infinite. Much of this cash is aimed at organizations that are primarily or at least overtly religious. Not just religious, but crazy religious. By that, I mean religion of the “Science is the work of the Devil!” variety. Yet those providing these funds seem to be mostly secularists. In fact, the key aim of these people appears to be just to convince the rubes to support the sorts of policies used to shackle the same rubes. Is it evil to use racism and intelligible-only-to-morons-who-don’t-understand-the-tenets-of-the-religion-to-which-they-claim-to-adhere religious arguments to convince the downtrodden to support their own downtreading, as long as some other group bears a more severe downtreading?